Fight Test by Will McMillan
A former contributor, Will McMillan’s “Conundrum” was one of three winners of the CRAFT 2024 Flash Prose Prize. His longform essay “How We Carry the Weight of It,” also published in CRAFT, was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2023.
McMillan’s flash-length essay “Fight Test” begins with a startling image of the narrator at eight years old, dragging his nails against his older brother’s arm, the flesh peeling “like an overripe banana” as he attempts to defend himself from his sibling’s onslaught. Despite its brevity, McMillan’s piece pulls no punches. The first section is quick and intense, em dashes cutting off sentences with memorable asides (a perfectly placed “Oh God!” encapsulates the brother’s childhood roughhousing and their then mutual hatred in a succinct phrase) and constant reminders of his brother’s emasculating taunts that the narrator fights “like a girl.” Verbs peppered throughout such as “clobber,” “pinch,” and “gouge” depict the young narrator doing anything he can not to win the fight, but to survive.
The initial scene closely mirrors what comes in the second half of the essay. We see the pair again, a decade later. The narrator has grown up and so has his brother, who’s returned from a tour in the Army, painted with scars. The sentence structure elongates, the pacing slows and one of the final lines trails off into ellipses in the way that a memory, however short, can feel endless in retrospect. The visceral conclusion parallels the beginning, a diptych structure McMillan says in his author’s note he always intended: “It was like unfolding the pages of a magazine, the images stark and clear in my mind, just waiting to put into words.” Through his essay, McMillan examines how the past shapes us, and how our memories can connect in surprising ways. —CRAFT
The flesh on his arms, like an overripe banana, peels as I drag my nails upward. Ribbons of crimson appear—thin, jagged trails up and down his skin. My brother doesn’t just yell—he shrieks. Not my older brother at all anymore but some strange, feral creature, crying in outrage. He springs his knees back from my chest, taking his weight and himself off my tiny, eight-year-old body. My breath crashes back in a wave as we scramble away from each other. This round of fighting is over.
“God!” he yells, cradling his arms. A mountain range of welts appear on his skin. “Why do you always have to fight like a girl?”
Unless I punch, I fight like a girl. Unless I strangle or pound or clobber, I fight like a girl. Unless I’m fighting like him, I’m a “her.” But what else can I do? He’s three years older, my brother. An entire head higher, at least twenty pounds heavier. And we hate—oh God!—how we hate one another. So naturally, we fight. And he punches me down to the ground—like a boy. He pins his knees on my chest—like a boy. He hocks stinking globs of spit in my face, tells me to quit crying, quit crying, quit crying you big baby. Like a boy. So I do what I have to. I pinch, I gouge, I scratch bloody canals through his arms.
“Like a girl,” he says over and over. “Only girls fight like that. Only girls scratch and pinch.”
Outrage boils into steam through my body. And now it’s my body I’m fighting—fighting the tears that want to rage out of me. Every time, every fight. It’s always the same. And he sings his song over and over. Like a girl…like a girl…you fight like a girl…
A decade will pass, and my brother’s arms twitch as he talks to me. Three years older, an entire head higher, but the last two years have shaved countless pounds from his body. He’s talking me through his life in the Army, in the Gulf, in the war that he fought in. He was deployed at nineteen. Now twenty-one, he’s home for a brief leave of absence. He lifts his shirt to show me a scar—a bullet he caught in the guts. A swollen array of deep royal purples, like an angry black eye in his belly. I cringe, and he smiles.
“He fucked me up good,” he says. “But the guy who shot me? I fucked him up worse.” He shapes his right hand into a flesh-and-bone pistol, and with his thumb as the hammer, fires two angry shots. “Pow! Pow!” Then he laughs, his chest swelling with well-rehearsed pride. He wears that pride like a medal. Yet my brother jumps when a truck rumbles by in the streets. He gasps when the bathroom door slams, when he hears footfalls coming up from behind. But the guy who shot him? My brother fucked him up worse. And I keep watching his arms as he talks, arms that won’t stop twitching and jerking and…
That night, my brother sleeps on the floor in my bedroom. And when a car alarm blares somewhere near in the darkness, he shrieks, and all I can hear is his shrieking, all I can feel is his body pushing back against mine as I throw myself on him, holding him, trying to calm him, to stop him from thrashing. And all I feel are his nails digging into me, peeling my flesh, pinching me, gouging me , and all I can do is take it and keep taking, pressing my weight on this strange, feral creature, waiting until this round of fighting is over.
WILL MCMILLAN is a queer writer born and raised in the untamed wild of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives to this day. His essays have been featured in CRAFT, The Sun, Electric Literature, and Bending Genres, among dozens of others. He has been twice nominated for Best American Essays (listed as a Notable Essay in the 2021 and 2023 editions), as well as the Pushcart Prize and Best Fictions (for which he was a 2023 winner). Find Will on Bluesky @willmcmillan.bsky.social and on Instagram @willmcmn.
Featured image by Dan Burton, courtesy of Unsplash.
